During the week of 15 January, 961,000 people filed new claims for state unemployment benefits, a number virtually unchanged from the previous week’s roster of 965,000.
For the same week in 2019, there were 282,000 claims filed.
This follows December’s 140,000 net loss, the first net monthly loss since last April.
The persistence of layoffs and furloughs emphasizes the economy’s weakness as a budding recovery grapples with a resurgent virus and a vaccine campaign that only recently began in earnest.
“The labor market started 2021 with very little momentum,” Greg Daco, Oxford Economics’ chief U.S. economist, told The New York Times. “If anything, there has been a deterioration.”
Job losses mounted in recent weeks as governments have renewed or tightened shutdowns to cope with the unrelenting COVID spread. Restaurants and bars shed another batch of jobs; the high level of persistent job losses could spread to other sectors as fewer employees earn paychecks to spend, analysts warn.
The economic pain will persist for some months; however, the accelerating vaccination campaign brings an end into view, Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Chicago’s Northern Trust, commented to The Times.
“There is no better economic stimulus than a successful vaccine rollout,” he said. “It will reduce” people’s sense of risk in interacting with others and “provide a basis on which different types of businesses can reopen more durably.”
TREND FORECAST: As winter sets in, unemployment will rise. Wall Street’s belief in a timeline by which a vaccine campaign will reset the economy to strong growth is far from certain. In surveys, more than 40 percent of Americans have signaled a reluctance, or outright refusal, to be vaccinated.
Thus, with “experts” saying that 60 to 90 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated before the COVID virus can be curbed, the Streets’ equation that mass vaccinations = growth will lag for months.
We maintain our forecast for an economic bounce-back this spring and summer followed by contraction into the “Greatest Depression.”
